I didn’t get to respond. As I stared at his distorted corpse, at his purple lips, which made him look as if he’d just been sucking an ice lolly, Mr Dhanda informed the undertaker from his wheelchair that the bandages should be removed, and my father was dragged towards a shower console on the other side of the room for the washing procedure. It turns out that we Sikhs are not the only people who indulge in this ritual: Judaism and Islam also advocate the washing of bodies. But while they do so according to strict rules – with some Muslims, for instance, insisting that the body be washed three times, or an odd number of times up to seven; and some Jews insisting the corpse should be cleansed carefully, including the ears and fingers, with nails pared and hair combed, so that the corpse can be laid to rest in the manner that the person had visited the synagogue during life – there seemed to be no system behind the way we did it at all.
One person washed a leg with soap. There was an argument about whether the few strands of hair on father’s head should be combed before the turban was retied. At one point my father’s body was turned over, and various bodily and embalming fluids leaked out of his mouth. I remember the removal of the bandages, revealing stitched-up post-mortem wounds beneath. I remember the crack of an arm as it was forced into the suit.
I guess, in theory, the washing of a corpse could be a positive experience. It could emphasise the circularity of life: we are washed as babies, when we are brought into the world, and then when we die. It could symbolise the washing away of sins, a return to the state of perfection we experience in the womb. Maybe there is some comfort to be found in seeing someone beyond pain. But for me the whole thing felt like a massive invasion.
Unlike my mother, my father was always a private man, so coy that I’d never seen him naked. I hadn’t even realised he was so bald until that moment: he kept his turban on at home, at least when I was visiting. And while Dhanda and his son had been part of our lives for so long, appearing in our home without warning, the way Punjabis do, my father never seemed particularly comfortable with them around. But here he was in his final moments on earth, naked, being manhandled, not only by strangers, but by people he disliked, with a radio in another room playing Dido.
It was awful for him. Though for me, the most terrible thing was the smell. You see, the problem with washing a corpse that has been frozen for a few weeks is that the body begins to decompose very quickly and suddenly when put in water. The stench had me throwing up in a corridor. I could smell it when I returned home and had the obligatory bath that my mother had already run for me. I could smell it when my father’s coffin stood in our overly warm front room for an hour, mourners filing past.
I was still retching as my fiancée’s family arrived en masse, getting it all wrong: Freya’s mother dressed in black instead of white, her father in a suit and tie instead of casuals, struggling to cross his legs in the temple, Freya in a skirt, being given a blanket in the temple to cover her long tanned legs, clearly worried that the headscarf was going to ruin her hairdo, saying sorry when we don’t say sorry, sitting with her feet pointing at the Holy Book, when we don’t point our feet at the Holy Book, reaching out to hug me when we don’t do public displays of physical affection. A few weeks earlier I had been so grateful for their patience and efforts during the engagement ceremony. But that day, with everyone staring, I felt embarrassed.
Later, when the visitors had left, the emptiness and quietness of the house felt so unbearable that I went and slept on my mother’s bedroom floor. There was a moment’s stand-off when she offered her bed – the urge to self-sacrifice, years of putting her son and husband first, was profound. But eventually she relented, and we spent the night talking about Dad. We had had weeks of nostalgia and reminiscence, of course. But not alone. We ended up talking half the night, telling our favourite stories about Dad, Mum recalling, among other things, the time he took an air rifle to the backyard and shot a pigeon, with the intention of flogging pigeon meat in the shop. I can’t imagine there would have been much demand for game in inner-city Wolverhampton, but the smell of the resulting flesh in the shed was such that my vegetarian mother wouldn’t let him back in the house until he had got rid of it. In return, I remembered how he would always buy a family pack of popcorn when we went to the cinema, find three smaller cartons and then stand in the corridor dividing it all. At the time I found it mortifying, lived in fear of being seen by a schoolmate, but telling the story, I found it touching, and not for the first time that week, fell to sleep on a damp pillow.
The next morning, I woke and found Mum was already downstairs. I assumed she was up to pray. But then: the sound of ringing. Not the ringing emitted by my iPhone, or by our landline, or the ding-dong that came when people pulled the iron pull mounted next to the private entrance into the house. It was the grating ring of the shop’s door-mounted alarm, which buzzed every time someone entered or left. The alarm that interrupted every episode of Neighbours I had watched as a teenager, every dinner we sat down as a family to eat. I initially half thought it might be a feature of the vivid dreams I’d been having since I had come back home. But when I got up, slumped down the stairs and followed the noise, which merged with the sound of prayers burbling from Mum’s cassette player in the hallway, through the green satin curtain that separated the house from the shop, there was another explanation. Mum was selling Amy Wilson a packet of cigarettes.
I’d only been in the shop once since my father’s death: to open it up for a cleaning company. One of the onerous discoveries about a suspected homicide was finding out that the families of victims are left with the task of cleaning up the crime scene after the police have removed the evidence. But the shopfront had been more than cleaned up, it had been transformed. The shutter was up, at least as far as it could go. The chilled section had been stocked with milk; a pile of nappies had been stacked near the door; and, behind the counter, near the spot which had a few weeks earlier been marked out with yellow plastic tags indicating findings of significance, stood my mother.
‘All roit, cocka,’ proffered Mrs Wilson in my direction, smiling broadly. ‘Fancied a lie-in, did yow?’
I ran a hand self-consciously through my hair and tightened the cord on my dressing gown. And then, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I took in a few more details: a medicine shelf stocked with goods bought in tiny quantities from Poundland (they were cheaper there than at the cash and carry), and a microwave that my father had recently installed for customers’ use.
The question of what would happen to the shop after a parental bereavement was something, again, I had given some thought to, but only from the point of view of my mother’s passing. I knew my father would want to carry on running the shop: it was his life. But my mother? No. We hadn’t discussed the future since Dad’s death, but I had just assumed that the next stage would be a trip to India, to consign my father’s ashes to Kiratpur Sahib, as seemed to be the fashion nowadays. Maybe some travelling afterwards: she had not, after all, returned to the subcontinent since childhood. Then some kind of retirement. But she clearly had other ideas.
‘Thank you, £4,’ she informed Amy, before turning to address me in Punjabi. ‘Some tea and paronthas in the kitchen. Get me a cup. And if you could call the newspaper people, we can get them started tomorrow.’
3 – BUNTY
SURINDER DIDN’T SLEEP that night. She spent it tossing and turning, feeling alternatively too hot then too cold, mentally rehearsing how she would tackle her mother in the morning. But with people hurrying past on the way to the local factories and foundries, grabbing papers before they were even handed over through the hatch, she didn’t get the chance. The following night she slept still worse. But again, she couldn’t seem to find the right moment. In the end a whole weekend had passed and Tanvir had almost grown a convincing beard to match his new turban before she got to the point, blurting out her feelings at five to five in the morning, as she helped her mother drag a crate of milk into the shop.
‘Mataj
i,’ she intoned. ‘I’d like to carry on at school next year. Carry on into the sixth form.’
In Punjabi this came out harsher than intended. She had been eleven when she left India to join her father in Britain, and Punjabi was her mother tongue, but the better she became at English, the less dexterous she seemed to become in Punjabi. She needn’t, however, have fretted. Mrs Bains hadn’t even registered her daughter’s pronouncement. The newspapers had just landed on the doorstep. There was no time for a cup of tea, let alone conversation.
Surinder persisted as she helped her mother lift the stack of Daily Mirrors from the doorstep on to the counter behind the hatch.
‘Mum . . .’ Her voice trembled. ‘I don’t want to leave school.’ Maybe a question would be better than a declaration. ‘I was wondering if I could stay on to do my A levels? Then maybe go on to nursing college? I want to be a nurse.’
In the years that followed, Surinder would not be able to recall where this desire to be a nurse came from, given that she knew no nurses, let alone Asian ones, had never been in hospital and was squeamish about blood. It actually came, like Tanvir’s haircut, from a magazine. Almost every girls’ title in the 1960s, from Bunty to Girls’ Crystal, seemed to feature a nursing-themed cartoon strip, with titles like ‘District Nurse Angela Ford’ and ‘Katy O’Connor: Ship’s Nurse’ outlining the limits of female professional ambition. There was even one strip called ‘I Want to be a Nurse’.
But the choice of profession was not the point. The point was that Surinder was defying her prescribed destiny, one drilled into her from the youngest age: to develop vital domestic skills and then to be married off into a good Sikh family. She may as well have suggested that she wanted to play spoons in a folk band. And when Mrs Bains finally registered what her daughter was going on about, she reacted as such, nipping the end of her index finger with the scissors she was using to open the stack of papers.
‘Hai!’ she yelped, sucking the incision. Her daughter ran to assist, but was pushed away. ‘What is this nonsense you’re spouting, Surinder?’ She examined her hand for blood. ‘Your poor father is lying sick in bed, his body broken from trying to provide for us. I’m trying to open the shop, keep things going, your sister is working twenty-five hours a day making sure there is food on the table, and all you can do is stand there blurting nonsense about college.’
Surinder began chewing the end of her ponytail before switching to her thumbnail, as she always did when being castigated, averting her eyes to a newspaper headline, which bellowed, ‘SACK FOR POWELL IN TORY RACE ROW’. Just as instinctively, her mother, who had resorted to tying chillies around her daughter’s thumb to encourage her out of the habit as a toddler, pushed her hand away from her mouth.
‘Stop that. How old are you now?’ This was one of her mother’s favourite rhetorical questions, along with ‘Do you want a tight slap?’ and ‘What will your future mother-in-law think?’ She didn’t want an answer, just wanted to follow it up with ‘Sixteen?’, even though Surinder was actually fifteen. But this was how Punjabis measured age: if you were fifteen, it was said that you had ‘begun your sixteenth year’, this being yet another way, Surinder thought, of making children behave older than they were. Her mother continued. ‘Too old, anyway, for such childishness. I don’t know where you get such ideas from. From those stupid books and magazines you read?’
Now it was Mrs Bains turn to feel she could have been more subtle. It was true that she came from a part of the world where a woman with no sons is considered not only unlucky but a carrier of bad luck, but she had refused to be cowed by fate. At least, when the girls were young, she had defied the warnings of her husband’s malevolent and grasping extended family – even the advice of her elder sister in England, who had whipped her children out of school as soon as possible – and lavished them with love and freedom, sending them to school to be educated like boys. Besides, she had not really come to terms with her husband’s recently mooted idea of marrying the girls off jointly. She had barely slept since he had mentioned it.
Surinder resumed her plea. ‘But Seema stayed on to do her A levels. She is studying to become a doctor and has not become bad.’
‘Seema? The Hindu girl at your school? Whose parents are lawyers from Bombay? Leh. Next you’ll be telling me you want to live like a gori and drink and wear miniskirts and cut your hair and have boyfriends and go dancing in nightclubs.’ Surinder blushed. ‘Good Sikh girls do not become nurses. We have your izzat to consider.’
Surinder moaned inwardly at the mention of izzat, the invisible force that dictated everything she could and could not do. It was the reason she had been stopped from playing with the boy at the garage next door when she was younger, why she could no longer pop into the hairdresser’s next door for a chat with Maureen. Sometimes she thought they might as well be still living in an Indian village. Sometimes she wondered why her parents didn’t just throw her into the local canal and have done with it. And she was considering saying so when they were interrupted by the sound of knocking on the front hatch. It was Mr Andrews, his ginger hair and black coat furred with rain. He worked at a nearby copper tubing plant and was a stickler for timing. If he didn’t have his paper by 5.01 a.m., he would start kicking the front door down.
‘One minute,’ shouted Mrs Bains at the hatch, pronouncing it ‘one ment’, waving her uninjured hand in his direction.
She turned back to her daughter and peered through bleary eyes. Even with her bottom lip sagging in self-pity, her uncombed hair forming an absurd frizzy halo around her head, her daughter was impossibly pretty. There was a time when this beauty had thrilled her, but now it just made her anxious. She took a deep breath and tried to sound reasonable. ‘Look, your father will not allow you to stay on at school. Too much education makes it difficult to adjust. And we are not like Seema’s family. We are simple people. We need your help in the shop. If you are lucky, God willing, maybe you will marry a doctor.’ She beamed at the thought, stroked her daughter’s face. ‘So stop this nonsense now, putt. And open the hatch before this bloody gora kicks it down.’
‘But Mataji . . .’
‘Bas.’ Two raised hands. ‘I haven’t got time for this. No more discussion!’
Inevitably, there was more discussion, just twelve hours later when Surinder returned from school, and was sent up to her father’s bedroom to relieve Baljit Kaur of her duties. Some children grow up with the threat of ‘Wait till your dad gets home’, but with Kamaljit and Surinder the warning had long been ‘Behave or you will be sent up to talk to your father.’ Not that they were allowed to complain about it, or in any way acknowledge it as a punishment or chore. Like being sent to do seva at the temple on the morning of one’s birthday, they were required to look upon the task of caring for their father as a privilege, a blessing.
There were other parallels between visiting the temple and visiting her father’s bedroom: both places smelt strongly of feet; it was compulsory, on entering, to cover one’s head as a mark of respect; one generally arrived with offerings of food and drink; and both were places where tradition and myth were reinforced. At least, having no recollection of her father as a healthy adult, Surinder felt that the tale of how Mr Bains lost his family in the West Punjab, travelled to Delhi, and then to England without his family and with just a shilling (‘shleng’) in his pocket and had gone on to build a thriving business was as intangible to her as ancient tales about Sants making pilgrimages to Indian jungles and living for decades on nothing but the leaves that had fallen from trees.
On opening the door, she was confronted with the dispiriting sight of her father’s bedside commode, kept to allow voiding at night. It sat on a cold wooden floor covered in lino, the durris and rugs removed to prevent tripping, next to a bed which had had its wooden legs cut down to make transfers easier. There was a mattress in the corner of the room, where her mother slept because Mr Bains had begun thrashing around so forcefully at night while acting out dreams and nightmares that he h
ad recently given her a black eye. This afternoon her father was lying still on his side, however, pillows placed between his knees and ankles and arms.
Surinder put the sandwich and tea she had brought on the dressing table which functioned as a medicine cabinet, and began the task of sitting her father up. He was moved around several times a day, to reduce the chances of bed sores, and was propped up vertically at mealtimes so that saliva would collect in the back of his throat which might, in turn, stimulate a swallow. A year ago he was still able to feed himself, though the food had to be cut into small pieces. A year before that he could use cutlery, though the knife and fork had to be extra sharp so they required less effort, and plates and bowls had to have high sides to make scooping easier. But now, though his tremor was less marked, he needed to be fed each meal, sandwiches being dunked into tea for ease of mastication.
Surinder watched as he struggled with his first bite. His scalp was dry and his facial expression was frozen, impossible to read. After his third bite, he lifted his hand – a signal which Surinder had learnt meant ‘stop’ – and made a noise which Surinder had learnt was an attempt to say her name. Unlike her mother, he spoke to Surinder in English, but she had to concentrate as he did so. The days he could bark instructions from his bed into the shop were now gone. He tended to mumble in a muffled monotone, his sentences petering out to the point of whisper.
‘Here, putt,’ he said, patting the bed next to him.
She placed the plate on the floor, moved from the chair to the bed, held his hand and waited for him to speak.
‘Your mother tells me. You want. College.’
She could not tell whether he was making a statement or asking a question, the ability to inflect being yet another skill that had been eroded by disease. But she corrected him anyway.
‘No, not college. Sixth form. My school has a sixth form, for A levels. My teachers think I could do well.’ Thinking she should get all her arguments in while she had a chance, she added, ‘It is a girl’s school.’
Marriage Material Page 4
